The news has recently come to light that Twitter is now considering adding a "Report Abuse" button to its site. It comes after a recent news story where a man was arrested in Manchester on suspicion of harassment (I've always thought that an incredibly ambiguous legal term): he sent a long and exhaustive list of tweets to one Caroline Criado-Perez, a woman who successfully campaigned to have more women appear on banknotes. £10 will now be represented by Jane Austen.
First off: why do we have to get rid of Charles Darwin?! This was a man who sailed halfway around the world at a time when it was incredibly dangerous to do so in order to explore the groundbreaking scientific theory that, instead of popping into existence by the command of a transcendental tyrant about six thousand years ago we actually evolved over millions of years from an ancestor we share with apes. He fundamentally changed the way we view not just our own biological history but the entire world. Whilst - especially as a writer myself - I don't wish to belittle the works of Jane Austen, I'm not sure her novels about some woman falling or not for some man who may or may not be interested in her and may or may not actually fancy that first woman's handmaiden or perhaps her sister sits in the same ranks as inspiring the single greatest scientific achievement of the 19th Century. I'm not even sure why this campaign was undertaken. We have women on the banknotes. Elizabeth Fry (a philanthropist most famous for her prison social reform ideas) is on the £5 note. There's another one as well... I forget her name...
Oh yeah. Queen Elizabeth II.
If you want to get more women on the banknotes, I have a few other suggestions than Jane Austen who, despite her novels and their influence, doesn't stand in the same light as Darwin, Smith or Watt. What about Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the suffragette movement? Or Rosalind Franklin, whose work led to greater understanding of the human genome? I would consider the work undertaken by these two women to have had a much greater impact on our world than Austen, to follow Fry as the second woman to appear on the back of one of our papers of currency.
I digress. The main focus of this particular blog is the reaction from this: whilst I'm a little annoyed, at least my frustration is which woman in our illustrious history should appear on the £10 note, and not that there is a woman on the £10 note.
According to the BBC, Ms Criado-Perez started receiving abusive tweets shortly after the Bank of England made their announcement, "about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours". The crime that was then filed was "malicious communications". Since then, a campaign has started to have Twitter add a "report abuse" button included on its website, so that anybody who feels they are being abused (or thinks someone is violating the site's rules) can report that activity. Most people seem to think it's right that such a button should exist. Most of the feedback in the media is people wondering why it wasn't there before, or that it makes absolute perfect sense to have such a capability.
I, on the other hand, am much more hesitant to jump on this bandwagon, for one thing alone. For a right that we in this country enjoy, and a right that our forebears fought long and hard for over the course of many centuries. Free speech. Not free activity; that at least is something we should govern, for people doing absolutely anything they want is usually counter-intuitive to society (although that usually depends on the person). We should restrict what people do, but restricting what people say can lead us down dangerous paths. Anybody is allowed to call me names, but nobody is allowed to punch me in the face.
Twitter won't be the first website to include such a button, but Twitter is unique in cyberspace due to the service it provides. It is a conduit for that right of free expression, and I'm suddenly reminded of Paul Chambers, who jokingly tweeted that he would blow up Robin Hood Airport and was subsequently arrested and tried for sending a "menacing electronic communication". Just listen to how "menacing electronic communication" sounds. Preposterous, isn't it?
There exists no way of showing the intent of a mental act - otherwise known as a "thought". This alone undermines the policing of any crime relating to what somebody says. It's why we have the right to free expression, because nobody has found a way of governing our minds. I always view any law that seeks to criminalise speech (even "hate speech") with a certain level of contrition.
Whilst Twitter is not a police force and so what I'm talking about doesn't really apply to them, I do fear people over-using the button and sooner or later we're all - cause we'll all be roped into it - going to have to answer the question as to where the line should be drawn, and why one rule can be applied to one person but not to another. Twitter should be careful about where it goes with this, and might I make an alternative suggestion that won't cause these problems?
"Ignore".
People do it to me all the time.
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